Recent Life Improvements
Monday March 29, 2021 — Taipei, Taiwan
I recently wrote a browser extension to block websites on a schedule. Currently, I have it set up to block Twitter (and a couple other distracting websites) except from 7pm — 10pm each day. There’s a small escape hatch as well: I can unblock a website temporarily, after a delay — I can click a button to unblock Twitter, for instance, then wait 5 minutes to be able to look at Twitter for 10 minutes.What usually actually happens is that I forget that I clicked the button, and I don’t look at Twitter at all, which is an excellent outcome.
I started tracking my mood a while ago, and the number one thing that correlated with not feeling bad was blocking Twitter. But I kept unblocking it to look at tweets people sent me, or to tweet things, and then getting sucked back in. Now that I use this extension, I don’t have much desire to look at Twitter anymore, and I’m much happier for it.
Nighttime Showering
I used to shower in the morning, but this meant that if I procrastinated on showering, I’d procrastinate on starting my entire day. This often ended up in ridiculous extremes, where I would avoid getting out of bed for hours and hours, since I didn’t feel like showering. I’ve started showering in the evenings more often, and it’s excellent: I have much more flexibility in when I shower, relative to other things I do, and I can go outside almost immediately after getting out of bed without feeling gross. This does mean that I usually need to wait an hour or so for my hair to dry before I go to bed, but that’s not been a significant problem — I often go to bed quite late anyways, having another reason that might happen isn’t a big problem.
Monthly Climbing Gym Pass
I got a monthly pass at the climbing gym recently, which results in me going climbing much more often. This is for a few reasons:
- I can go climbing for just 30 or 45 minutes, without feeling like I haven’t gotten enough value from the half-day pass
- I don’t have to worry about wanting to go climbing just before one of the times when a half-day pass ends — whenever I want to climb, I can just go and know that on the margin, it won’t cost me anything.
I basically always feel really good after climbing, so even if I pay more for the monthly pass than I would for the individual passes, it’s still worth it if I end up climbing more often than I would otherwise.
I’m curious what improvements other people have made in their lives recently! If you started doing something that improved your life, I’d love to hear what it is :)